The Birth of Biopolitics
| Author | Michel Foucault |
|---|---|
| Translator | Graham Burchell |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Published | St Martin's Press |
| Media type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
The Birth of Biopolitics is a part of a lecture series by French philosopher Michel Foucault at the Collège de France between 1978 and 1979 and published posthumously based on audio recordings. In it, Foucault develops further the notion of biopolitics introduced in a previous lecture series, Security, Territory, Population, by tracing the ways in which the eighteenth-century political economy marked the birth of a new governmental rationality. Foucault uses the term Governmentality and raising questions of Political science, political philosophy and social policy concerning the role and status of the State and neo-liberalism in twentieth century politics.
For Foucault, biopolitics is political power exercised on whole populations in every aspect of human life. Foucault discusses the basic definition of the practices of the neoliberal art of government. Foucault then tries to redefine the boundaries set by liberal thought on this matter. Foucault concentrates on the monetary aspect of government as a point of concern, frugal government, the art of maximum and a minimum and between the total opposite minimum and maximum.
Foucault looks at the early institutional practices of this method of frugal government, which starts from the early Middle Ages down to the early 16th and 17th centuries. The market appears from the early Middle Ages where the function of interest on money lending was strictly prohibited; one of the reasons being that the church was the main institution lending money at interest on church property where rental income was charged on church property a primary source of income for the church and it would have brought down the price of the church rental income if faced with rival competitors. Justification, according to Foucault, for the market was justice which was why the market existed in the first place. But, what was meant by justice? Foucault offers this explanation; it was a site of justice in the sense that the sale price fixed in the market was seen, both by theorist and in practice, as a just price, or at any rate a price that should be the just price, which meant to the theorists of the day a price that was to have a certain relationship with work performed, with the needs of the merchants, and of course, with the consumers needs and possibilities.
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